At the start of 2022, 48-year-old language teacher Olena Fedosieieva was enjoying a happy, comfortable life in Dnipro, Ukraine.
But as talk of a Russian invasion escalated, she found herself in a horrible holding position.
For a month, she wouldn't let her teenage daughter out of her sight. She prepared documents. A suitcase was packed.
Then, when she woke to the sound of bombs on the morning of February 24, she knew the time had come.
"We realised this is war," she says.
Ms Fedosieieva drove with her daughter and sister for more than 24 hours non-stop to flee Ukraine, which was under attack by Russian forces.
For five days, they were stuck at the Romanian border, during which time the three women lived out of their car. It was winter and temperatures dropped to minus five.
"You don't show what you feel, you just do," Ms Fedosieieva says.
She describes that moment of waiting at the border as "the beginning of the war in my life".
But it was the beginning of another change, too.
By the time Ms Fedosieieva and her family arrived in Germany, where she's based today, she had made a decision that many others in Ukraine have, too.
She switched languages.
A year after fleeing her home, Ms Fedosieieva has largely ditched Russian — the language her generation of Ukrainians grew up with and used all their lives — and has replaced it with one "from the heart": Ukrainian.
For Ms Fedosieieva, it's been an easy decision.
"When you speak Russian, you have a great pain. You feel pain," she says.
"Because Russian is connected with invasion, with deaths of your friends, with deaths of children, and the destruction of your country, your culture, people.
"You cannot speak Russian."
'Heavy suppression' of Ukrainian identity
According to a 2001 census, roughly 30 per cent of Ukrainians speak Russian as a first language.
Historically, the Russian language has been dominant across parts of Ukraine, explains Olga Maxwell, a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne's School of Languages and Linguistics.
She tells ABC RN's Counterpoint it is the result of Ukrainians' "centuries of persecution and Russification".
Ukraine gained independence from the USSR in 1991. Before that, in the 17th and 18th centuries, large parts of what is now the modern-day Ukrainian state had been incorporated into the Russian Empire.
"In the early 1930s, during Stalin's rule … there was quite heavy suppression of ethnic identity — Ukrainian identity," Dr Maxwell says.
Russian language held prestige and was the language required for education or to get a good job, she explains.
Today, Ukraine's two main languages are Russian and Ukrainian. However Ukraine is a multi-linguistic country where "what language you speak does not necessarily identify what kind of identity you have", Dr Maxwell says.
"So you've got Crimean speakers, you've got Russian speakers, but they all identify as Ukrainian."
After independence in 1991, there was a slow movement of Ukrainians starting to switch languages from Russian to Ukrainian. For some, like Ms Fedosieieva, speaking Russian brought "suffering", Dr Maxwell says.
Then, after the Russian invasion in 2022, even more people started switching.
"Of course, Russian is spoken," Dr Maxwell says. "But because there is so much collective trauma, especially with this full-scale invasion, Ukrainian language is now taking a more important [role].
"It is identified with Ukraine, with unity, with solidarity."
One Ukrainian who switched languages, Sasha Dovzhyk, described her decision this way: "Russian is my mother tongue and liberation means ripping it out of my throat."
"There is resistance against the language of the occupier," Dr Maxwell says.
'Speech from the heart' can't be destroyed by war
Ms Fedosieieva says despite growing up speaking Russian, her Ukrainian culture has always been a huge part of her life.
"We [were] still proud to be Ukrainian. We just had [a] lack of Ukrainian language," she says.
She's now found that, while her homeland is no longer a safe place for her to be, and she's been forced away from the physical ties to her culture, language is something that's untouchable.
"You cannot destroy [it] because this is our culture we learned from generations," Ms Fedosieieva says.
"We want to protect and save our culture. And that's why people speak Ukrainian.
"It's a language [but it] is actually yourself … It's from the heart. The speech from the heart."
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